The science is settled

Report: Criminologists, Economists Find Benefits to Gun Ownership:

Economists and criminologists have very different approaches to research and different political views, but they both generally find benefits from gun ownership,” Lott told Townhall in an email. “Economists, on the whole, were much more likely than criminologists to believe that there are benefits from gun ownership.  By a factor of 12-to-1, economists believe that permitted concealed handguns reduce rather than increase murder rates.  Despite their differences, still criminologists also believe this by a factor of just 2-to-1.”

Perhaps surveys such as this will help Americans take a level-headed approach to gun control in the future.

No. It won’t help Americans take a level-headed approach to gun control. This is because anti-gun people have never been “level-headed”. If they had the capacity to be level-headed they wouldn’t have been anti-gun to begin with and they wouldn’t have to lie to gain traction.

We must continue to fight them culturally and politically until they become as irrelevant as the KKK which they so closely resemble.

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9 thoughts on “The science is settled

  1. Yes, and until we can convince people that depriving others of the right to effective self defense is simply wrong, the statistical analyses are pretty irrelevant.

    For example; how many people would entertain the thought of legalized rape in light of some new statistics showing that it could benefit the economy? Slavery was once though to benefit the economy, at least in some places. What about harvesting organs from schoolchildren? Maybe that would create jobs, boost the economy AND save adult lives. Boy howdy; we should look into that, huh? Let’s do a fucking study.

    It wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, matter whether it might have some side benefit because it’s wrong, see, and it’s wrong because it violates people’s rights.

    You don’t entertain the violation of rights as national policy. Not unless you’re a criminal. Therefore you don’t do cost/benefit studies on government-sponsored rights violation programs. Any such study misses the point (and I say, intentionally).

    If we can’t get this simple and obvious concept of right and wrong across to Americans, then we’ll have to use credible threats instead, because it means we’re dealing with dangerous criminals. Which will it be?

    • Bingo. Beautiful.

      I’d add that the true measure of the Second Amendment is that we have had the peaceful transition of power after elections because the government knows that blatant wide-scale election fraud and any “President for Life” attempts would result in piles of politician corpses.

      It’s also why we do not have a standing army (although we are a bit close with our militarized police forces) and most of our civil rights are intact or at least still breathing.

      • Sadly, it would not end in mounds of political corpses, they’d mostly be ordinary people ,with just a handful of actual politicians that really should be lamp-post decorations. In any real revolution, if you can’t off at least 2:1 politicians and their direct supporters and enforcers, you are doing it wrong.

        • True. It is the tiny minority of politicians that order the jack-booted thugs to harm and suppress the citizens.

          In an ideal revolution with justification for abuses then the only “casualties” will be the feckless politicians who deserve their demise. The best examples are the fate of Mussolini and his mistress and the Ceaușescu husband and wife despotic team. Much less collateral damage and focused justice on the guilty parties.

          Alas, revolutions are usually slugfests and the body count is high with innocent blood being shed. That is doing it wrong as you said.

          • I don’t have a problem if more of the political class gets whacked along with any that are deemed directly at fault. It might be an object lesson to future politicians and their lackeys. They are mostly all enablers for bad .gov actions. They allow bad things to happen on their watch, and most make no attempt to restrain the worst of the bunch.

            In fact, the lesson would be even more pointed if previous denizens of those viper pits were included in the tally. It takes a real clue-bat to get the attention of political types and their sycophants.

            I’m not really looking forward to such an upheaval in our society. As even a skim of history shows, most attempts to change the direction of a nation don’t go as well as is envisioned by the participants. That potential for disaster, quite properly, is what really keeps attempts to reorder things to a minimum number. Except for 3rd world areas, obviously!

        • Tyrants and despots will ALWAYS have minions willing to do their dirty work for them. And the most leaders don’t care how many minions they lose in the conflict; only that the conflict furthers the goal of control. Minions are expendable. And their loss can always be used for propaganda purposes.

          I’ve often thought that a better way to defeat an enemy was to target the people calling the shots rather than the minions that carry out their orders and wishes. (I know that the minions may be more accessible than the shot-callers, it may be more personally satisfying attack the bee rather than the queen. But that isn’t always the most efficient way to destroy a hive.)

          To target the minions in any conflict requires a large expenditure of your own resources AND likeminded people, unless you have an overwhelming superiority already. And then it still results in massive casualties of minions and collateral damage on the other side.

          The whole point of conflict is to make the other side loose the will to continue the fight. That usually comes after the people leading the other side come to the conclusion that they can’t continue to resist and are willing to throw their followers under the bus (while negotiating for their own golden parachute, or retreating to fight another day). Whether because the support on their own side rebels at the cost in life or treasure, or the leaders see the folly of continuing.

          Why not simply cut out the middle-man (the enforcers) and go directly after the people who need to be persuaded to give up?

          That of course may result in individuals on ‘our side’ taking one for the team, but if I’m going to be ‘taking one for the team’ by slugging it out with the minions on the other side, I’d MUCH rather ‘take one’ knowing up front that I made a much bigger contribution by going after the true enemy, that being cannon fodder for the cause.

  2. Pingback: SayUncle » Anti-gunners don’t need proof

  3. I didn’t make the connection before, but it seems that politicians act very much like the management types in business. The difference between employees and management is the way each group thinks about a company, and therefore how they act. I was totally clueless about this until I read the book “Neanderthals at Work”.

    The mindset of managers is nowhere near as logical as a worker would think. Most people look at the shenanigans of managers at all levels, and wonder just what the hell they think they are doing, since quite often their maneuvering is contrary to the best interests of the business itself. That is a key point, that what is best for the manager personally, is their primary focus. The well-being of the business, both short term and long, takes a decidedly lower priority in their mind. In fact, a close observation of them shows that, for a fair percentage of them, the business exists only to provide them with a framework within which to joust with others of their ilk.

    It would appear that the label “office politics” makes a lot more sense when this perception is taken into consideration.

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